In case you didn’t read all of the entries in last week’s post about spectacular resignations, here are some of my favorites.

1. “One guy quit, and left up an out-of-office message with stupid quotes from all of his bosses and seniors over the year – attributed to them by name. Because our IT is so notoriously bad, it took well over a week from them to fully disable his account so that the out-of-office stopped being sent.”

2. “The summer after my first year of college, I worked at a call center doing cold-call sales. One of my coworkers ripped off his headset one day, screamed ‘I QUIT THIS PLACE SUCKS’ and stalked out. He got in his ancient Nissan minitruck, put it in gear, and attempted to drive over the landscaping between his parking spot and the driveway. He bottomed out trying to drive over a bush, got stuck, and ended up having to come back in and ask for help pushing his car off the landscaping from the coworkers he’d just staged his great exit from, his face a particularly remarkable shade of vermilion.”

3. “Ohhhh, I worked one of those jobs when I was in college. I was studying Philosophy, but nothing gave me more appreciation for Marx than working at the survey call center. I stuck it out for six months while I finished my degree and got a better job, but lots of people didn’t.

One day a girl next to me just left. I wasn’t paying much attention, but she left her jacket and everything so I figured she’d gone to the bathroom. Twenty minutes later a manager came up, looked around and left a nasty note on her keyboard. Another twenty minutes later he asked me if I knew where she’d gone. We looked at her stuff and it looked like she had left her jacket and just her purse – like, none of the stuff in it, she’d taken her wallet and phone. And left the other stuff as a ruse to give herself a good headstart on us, I guess?”

4. “I worked in high school at a mismanaged grocery chain that is now out of business. I was a cashier but they had a 16-year-old girl working behind the fish counter (which was illegal) and who was not being paid properly for the work she was doing (because she wasn’t supposed to be doing it!).

On Sunday, the beginning of the pay period, she clocked in, wrote ‘I QUIT’ in cod, haddock, and tilapia filets in the seafood counter, and clocked out. She framed a photo of her masterwork and her last paycheck for $2 and hung it in her bedroom.”

5. “I’ve been a member of an online message board for several years. About 10 years ago or so, one of the other board members announced he was going to quit his job at a grocery store and asked for suggestions on how he should leave. Not expecting him to take me up on my suggestion, I recommended that he have a little parade, driving one of the motorized shopping carts down the frozen foods aisle, with lit sparklers attached to the front and a boombox on the back playing something jubilant (‘We Are The Champions’ or some such). As it turns out, he took me up on the suggestion, had someone record the whole thing, and we got to watch a very happy ex-employee escort himself out at about 1.5mph past the Hungry Man dinners.”

6. “A colleague’s good friend had been wooed up by my company for a good 6 months. He was utterly qualified in ways we needed, a very nice guy, the perfect employee. Alluring phone calls, escalating propositions, nice dim sum lunches, they went all out. Finally, he accepted, and a starting date was set.

We had flextime at that company, meaning every waking hour was spent there but you could pretty much choose when to be awake. Alas, that particular week a couple of us (I’m one of the guilty parties) had particularly gnarly personal things to deal with before getting to work, and consistently didn’t make it in before 11-12. And equally alas, we were on the West Coast in financial services, so we already started the day ‘late’ by market standards, and to add to this the CEO was a fanatical morning person. Normally he left us to it, but this specific week he was in a bad mood, and got riled up by our seeming slackness (partly caused by staying at work way past his bedtime, but that’s another story).

So he did what Alison repeatedly warns you not to: instead of dragging the culprits into his office and giving them the personal drubbing he thought they deserved, he wrote a memo to everyone. So on his second day that Second Coming Guy meandered in to work, at a reasonable 10ish, and he found a memo on his chair saying something like ‘I’d like to remind y’all that technically your working hours are 8-5, and that you really should be here as close to that as possible blah blah blah.’ He raised his elegant eyebrows, said in a not overly loud but very clear tone of voice, ‘Oh, I can’t deal with that,’ delicately put the memo back on the chair, and walked out, never to be seen again.

Nobody was ever reprimanded for their hours again at that place, not even a hint.”

7. “When I was a supervisor at a well-known retailer, an employee in the garden center was reprimanded for something or other. He became so incensed that he went to the corner of the garden area, dropped his drawers, and pooped on a pallet. Then he quit.”

These epic threads, I’ll bookmark them, and then every time I have to stop reading I’ll replace the bookmark with one from the comment anchor (the timestamp) of the comment I’m on. It takes quite a few sessions to get through, but totally worth it. :) I also did that with the “weirdly dramatic responses to mundane office changes” post.

Ooooo I bookmark a thread but often can’t go back to it as I am lost in the hundreds of Comments. I am having a bad day so can you please explain the timestamp thing again? I am not catching on as to how you do that?

Under each commenter’s display name is a direct link to the comment: aam dot org slash post link-comment number. Bookmarking that rather than the post or top of a thread would take you directly to where you left off. Unfortunately, you’ll breeze past threads you’ve read with new comments, but sometimes you just want to get through the comments!

If you struggle with the timestamp (or want to bookmark partway down a thread in another venue where the timestamps don’t work the same way), another option is to edit the title of the bookmark to include the first few words of the place where you last left off. For example, if I wanted to start at your comment, I’d edit the title of the bookmark to start with “Ooooo I bookmark”. Then when I return to the thread, I use my browser’s search function (Ctrl+F in many browsers) to search for “Ooooo I bookmark”, and it takes me right to the place where I left off.

One of our local supermarkets has a fish counter team given to doing quite surreal displays with the fish (think fish heads with plastic grass ‘crowns’ and such) and so my family have been going up there and taking pictures for our amusement. Hopefully one day we will see someone quit via fish.

That would be more like the UK defence person who resigned via a letter set to super-high top secret – which no-on e had clearance to open, read, or handle, so it then had to be collected by a special team to be delivered to someone with super-high top secret clearance….

I feel like the Tilapia Resignation is going to become, like, part of the lore of the AAM commentariat. We’re going to be babbling about Wakeen, llamas, and resigning via haddock and some newbie is going to be like OH MY GOD I’M SO CONFUSED

True, but if you read the post, she actually resigned via haddock, tilapia AND cod — commenters are just choosing the fish name that make them happiest to write. (And, perhaps, trying to erase the COD confusion.)

Can someone explain this to me? I’ve only been working for 5 years and never anywhere super flexible so maybe I’m naive…

Is the idea that the boss was clearly so awful the guy was smart and jumped ship early? I thought that was the point but he seemed so lazy and unprofessional to me.

To me, coming in at 10ish on your second day at work (when you haven’t been specifically told to come in late) seems like a bad idea/bad sign. Sure flexible hours are great, but who needs to use them on day two? Two hours late is a lot.

Depends on how it was presented to him in the hiring process – if they really emphasized flex hours so he accepted because he liked that perk, then on day two felt scolded for using those flex hours, that feels like a bait and switch.

My last company had flex hours and work from home and really emphasized it as a great feature of the company, so people would start using flex hours right away to have better commute times or what have you. A few months after I started they cut way back on work from home, which was one of the biggest reasons some of the staff decided to take a job there (located in the heart of a congested and expensive city where many people have to commute from outside of it, being able to take a couple days a week to not pay for tolls and sit in an hour+ of hostile traffic was a Big Deal). Some people turned down higher pay elsewhere to work there for the increased convenience and were quite angry when that big perk was no longer there.

Sadly, it wouldn’t surprise me if the answer was “nothing”. In college I once used the bathroom in a house full of college boys and not only was there no TP, there wasn’t even an empty roll to indicate there ever had been.

My guess is that what he was being reprimanded for was needing to take the occasional bathroom break or something related to that. Making his response “oh really I can’t leave the area when I say I need to? Ok then I guess I’ll just have to poop wherever I can then.”

We used to have a Korean bbq joint in our little city but it closed down (understandably too–irregular non predictable hours are killer for a business). But oh the food was so good and I miss it so much.

Now I want bibimbap. They had a great vegetarian one near my workplace in Bern, and now I live in Japan with thousands of Koreans and can’t eat it because they all have meat. (The dishes, not the Koreans.)

I know, right? On my last day of my last retail job, a customer berated me for not giving him his receipt quickly enough, and I wish I had torn it into bits and tossed it in his face. I’ll never have that opportunity again.

One of my friends likes to tell a story about how when she was a cashier at a grocery store, she had a customer complaining about (prices, waiting in line, etc). He said, “I’m never shopping here again, I’m going to throw away my [store loyalty card]!” So she held out her hand and said, “Here, I’ll do it for you.” She didn’t get fired, but she did have to write the gentleman an apology letter, along with sending him a new card.

one time, at a restaurant I worked at (my husband also worked there, I was not here for this but he was), a server came back to the kitchen mad about her section (namely, that it had tables in it), and yelled at the Kitchen Manager, who had nothing to do with her section, as he was managing the kitchen, not the dining room. He was plating up a very large order on a tray (table of ~10, so at least 5 entrees on his tray), making sure it had all the condiments, garnishes, sides, etc. He told her she should take it up with the other manager out in the dining room, can she please drop off this food on her way?

She picked up the tray, but after resting it on her shoulder for a second, instead of delivering the food, she slammed the tray against the wall behind the soda machine, and stormed out of the building.

I stopped working there 5 years ago, at minimum it happened 8 years ago, but we STILL talk about that when the gang gets together because it was so incredible.

On days where I’m especially frustrated at my job, I always plan out what I would say in my “f you” speech as I walked out the door after quitting. Of course, I would never do it because of the reasons you listed but sometimes it’s really nice to just think about how I would tell my boss that’s shes so unnecessarily dramatic, isn’t as great of a project manager as she believes she is and how her shoes are really obnoxious and everyone in the office hates them. It makes me feel better to think about it for a few minutes and allows me to move past my annoyance at the moment.

Hey, I’m famous! Now I just need an open thread where I can tell the story of the manager who used his office to get naked and send inappropriate photos to (what he thought were) teenage girls. Funnily enough, that happened at the same place as my submission for this topic (#7).

They were not cops. They were fellow [big-box retailer] employees. The employees didn’t like the manager, so they created an AIM profile with info for a 16-year-old girl. One of them found out the manager’s screen name and started talking to him online. Eventually, the manager locked himself in his office, took off his clothes, took a photo, and sent it to the “girl.” The “best” part is that the picture had a binder with the company logo on it in the background. The manager got fired, but AFAIK, the police were not involved. I was only 18 at the time, so I wasn’t too savvy with navigating this type of situation.

I had a boss like that except he wasn’t taking photos he was flashing the vacation apartments across the very narrow street. One of the police officers who showed up mid performance described him as “like a silver back gorilla asking to be drawn like one of your French girls”. It’s a mental image that’ll never leave me.

Off-topic, but I need to tell you I love your name. It’s one of my favorites things I remember from Friends. Don’t know why that has stuck with me all these years. Perhaps it’s the sheer poetry of how the syllables ripple outwards. As you were, everyone. Sorry for the digression.

I totally read it as “resigning via cash-on-delivery” which was also confusing, but I suspected would be wonderful. Now someone needs to do that, whatever it would involve. Or possibly make a movie about it. Ben Stiller, maybe?

It’s hard to pick a favorite from this glorious selection, but since I am a salaried professional working in an office where there was a Thing and some Drama about starting times this year, I am going to have to go with #6.

Unlike many people here, I immediately understood “resigning via cod” to mean the fish, and I hadn’t read that comment. I wonder if that’s because I’m just twisted that way, or if I’ve been working in Massachusetts history and tourism too long…

No, I thought that too – then again, I live in Massachusetts. I was picturing something more like, “and the employee hid a near-expiration-date fish behind the freezer where it would rot and when we finally found the source of the stench it had a note taped to it saying ‘I quit'” or something.

A busperson at my teenage diner job just walked out on her first week. Didn’t tell anyone, never saw her again. It took us like forty minutes to realize because it was so busy we all just thought she was helping someone else…

I thought #2 and I might have worked at the same place if not for the ending! During my time at an inbound call centre, a guy a couple cubicles down from me screamed “FUCK THIS!” and threw his headset down in the middle of a call, which was followed by the manager yelling “OUT!” and pointing towards the exit. This was all very clearly heard by the customer I was on the phone with, who simply said “Oh, it sounds like someone isn’t having a good day.”
Of course this was the same place where, after letting go of a bunch of mostly seasonal staff (who were not told they were seasonal, and kept saying stuff like “I wonder when we’re going to get the rest of our training!”) one of the managers said to us “We know there is a morale problem around here, but we don’t know why. If you have any ideas about what the problem could be feel free to leave a note in my mailbox.’

Oh, I’ve had the “seasonal but not told you’re seasonal” thing happen to me. A close cousin to the ubiquitous “temp-to-perm” job that will never (or probably never, or not for literally years) become perm.

Re: #6. Something like that happened at my now former workplace. Our CEO sent a rather heavy handed mass email to all about days/hours we had to be in the office after rescinding the work from home policy. Needles to say, 2 people have quit thus far at least in part because of it.
It wasn’t my sole reason, but it was kind of a straw that broke the camels back.

People do horrible and disgusting things in a hotel. One of my crappy paying-for-college summer jobs was as a housekeeper in a third-rate hotel near a regional airport, and it was before Febreeze was invented, which made it extra-horrible. You will lose your faith in humanity at such a job. People are nasty.

I work across the street from an overpriced college dorm type place. The students have been notified that yes, we can see you when you walk around naked/have sex etc. with the shades open and so can the people in the building on the other side of you…which happens to be a federal prison.
They don’t seem to mind and I guess it brightens the prisoners’ day!

When I was in college I worked in a bar. The job itself wasn’t too bad and I liked my co-workers, but the management was terrible and disorganized. There was one manager who was the type of person where if he was in a bad mood, EVERYONE was going to be in a bad mood. It was not unusual to find a server crying in the bathroom. They scheduled me for three times as many hours than I asked for in my interview and when I was hired and after several attempts to decrease my hours, my Engineering classes were taking a hit. So I needed to quit. They also forgot to write me a paycheck once or twice.

I went in planning to announce that I was quitting and try to negotiate two weeks of notice to one week. Well, immediately after I said, “I need to quit” the manager went on a long angy rant about how I am such a sh**ty person for quitting a job. How dare I quit a job after they spent so much effort training me. (They don’t really train me, we were all pretty much thrown to the wolves). Also, how dare I not make working at a bar my most important priority. How hard can engineering classes be? So I kept my mouth shut and decided I was quitting on the spot with no notice.

I had to go in a week later to pick up my last paycheck. They said they lost my paycheck and I could pick it up another day. Well, it was a Friday afternoon and my parents were waiting in the parking lot so I could go home for the weekend. I went to their car and said I didn’t have a paycheck. My dad (who was already upset with the fact that I was called names for quitting and for how I was treated as an employee) stormed in and demanded to see a manager. After waiting several minutes a manager (not the one who called me the name) came out with my “lost” paycheck. My dad told the manager off saying he didn’t appreciate people calling his daughter names and driving her to quit until the guy was almost shaking.

(For the record, other than this job I have a pretty good reputation for staying at jobs. I worked at one place for a few years in high school and they always let me pick up shifts when I was home for breaks. I had a campus job for my first few years of college and always got great performance reviews and quit on good terms. I also had several internships at one company and they made me a fantastic full time offer when I graduated).

Yeeeeep, I once made the mistake of giving a manager at a shitty fast food place my actual class schedule. suddenly I was nearly full time “oh you can just swing in a half hour after your class, it’s only ten minutes away”. immediately put in my two weeks.

Over on Wonkette, there’s a post about an epic “Hell will freeze over and I still won’t work for you” letter from a law student who was “dead-set on public service — had been since the age of six — but the on-campus recruiters from the big firms hounded her. One was doggedly insistent that she apply for an internship. A recruiter from Jones Day. He said it was something you don’t say no to. Jones Day bills itself as the nation’s largest law firm. It employs 2500 lawyers on five continents. It has a revenue of $1.94 billion.”

If you haven’t heard of them and don’t know why a public-service minded lawyer would want to deliver an epic smackdown, don’t worry, you also get their history:

My favorite biglaw missive was the one an associate sent to the whole firm rejecting cash for signing a termination agreement with an NDA. This was during the recession when biglaw firms were laying off associates. She called out the firm on acting with cruelty instead of humanity. She became a sort of hero at the time.

“As for your request for a release, non-disclosure, and non-disparagement agreement in return for three months’ pay, I reject it. Unlike you, I am not just a paid mouthpiece with no independent judgment. I will decide how and to whom to communicate how you have treated me. I find it ironic that you would try to buy the right not to be disparaged after behaving as you have. Your actions speak volumes, and you don’t need much help from me in damaging your reputation.”

At Giant Co. employees were generally hired as seasonal and then competed for permanent positions. Most would not get a permanent position, of course, and there was much emotion. So on his last day, one seasonal employee with access to the trouble-ticket filing system filed a highest-priority, wake-the-CEO-in-the-middle-of-the-night trouble ticket to say, “Good bye!” Pretty sure he killed any chances of rehire, lol.

I worked at a hospital in a very busy ER. We had a new nurse who was on day 2 or so of orientation. She went to lunch (the person training her was watching their patients) and never came back. It was super busy so it took a while for her preceptor to realize how long she had been gone. She had either stopped by the manager’s office or called her (can’t remember which) but the manager didn’t tell anyone in the nurse’s station so we had no idea that she had quit for several hours.

My mother used to be the administrator of a nursing home. One Friday afternoon, her Director of Nursing quit without notice while also giving all the other nurses the weekend off. The nurse scheduled to finish at 11:00 that night finally called my mother to ask where her relief nurse was. My mother called every other nurse on staff, but nobody answered. The poor nurse ended up working an unscheduled double shift while my mother scrambled for coverage for the weekend from affiliated homes in the area and temp agencies.

This same Director of Nursing had the audacity to use my mother as a reference six months later. Obviously my mother gave an honest reference detailing the whole episode, concluding with DO NOT HIRE. The other facility listened and didn’t. At that level, the DoN should have given a month’s notice in the first place, not counting the other shenanigans. That bridge was nuked from orbit!

Last month I quit a grocery store cashiering job. It was a job I didn’t much like, but I did it because I needed to pay rent and eat. I am now finally at a much better job. How I wish I’d quit just like #6 left his grocery store gig.

And I’m another commentator who thought quitting by cod meant Cash on Delivery mail. Is COD mail even still a thing?

One of our vendors at my retail gig sends us products COD! I was so confused the first time it happened. Apparently, UPS employees have to pay back any missing checks out-of-pocket. As someone who loses stuff all the time, I am horrified.

I missed the original thread, but my favorite story was when I worked at a fast food restaurant. The manager, Wakeen, caught a teen employee, Fergus, punching back in from break then running back to the break room to sneak an extra 10-15 mins off. Wakeen held up Fergus’ punched time card, and Fergus groaned “Busted!” To which Wakeen replied “Suspended!”

About 40 minutes later, it’s the middle of the lunch rush. Cars backed up in the drive thru, lobby packed 4 people deep. This car squeals up next to the drive through and a woman jumps out, hoisting up her dress to reveal her birthday suit. “EAT THIS WAKEEN!”

Before Wakeen can process what he’s seeing, Fergus slinks out and says “Hi Mom” then jumps in the passenger seat. The car squealed off and Fergus was never seen there again.

I’m trying to wrap my mind around how anyone in financial services coming in at noon on the West Coast has a job at all, or how the group stays in business — it’s not just “late” by market standard hours, it’s arriving at 3 pm Wall Street time with the closing bell in 1.5 hours.

Global financial services are global? If you’re talking about a real financial services company, it’ll have multi-national interests trading in all the different stockmarkets around the world, which means multiple time-zones need covering.

Oh my goodness! I was wondering how in the world someone who managed to resign from their job via the video game at Call of Duty. Honestly, I was spinning the story in my head of somebody who had a work environment we’re playing a multiplayer videogame was considered a team-building exercise or something.